Computer Networking

Helps readers make the connection between the concepts of network analysis and real world applications. Focusing on protocols, this paperback manual offers a flexible presentation that allows it to be used with bottom up and top down approaches. Hands-on networking experience, without the lab! The best way to learn about network protocols is to see them in action. But that doesn’t mean that you need a lab full of networking equipment. This revolutionary text and its accompanying CD give readers realistic hands-on experience working with network protocols, without requiring all the routers, switches, hubs, and PCs of an actual network. Computer Networking: Internet Protocols in Action provides packet traces of real network activity on CD. Readers open the trace files using Ethereal, an open source network protocol analyzer, and follow the text to perform the exercises, gaining a thorough understanding of the material by seeing it in action. Features

• Practicality: Readers are able to learn by doing, without having to use actual networks. Instructors can add an active learning component to their course without the overhead of collecting the materials.
• Flexibility: This approach has been used successfully with students at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Appropriate for courses regardless of whether the instructor uses a bottom-up or a top-down approach.
• Completeness: The exercises take the reader from the basics of examining quiet and busy networks through application, transport, network, and link layers to the crucial issues of network security.

This revolutionary text and its accompanying CD replace a whole lab full of computer equipment. They give computer science students realistic hands-on experience working with network protocols, without requiring all the routers, switches, hubs, and PCs of an actual network. Using the latest version of the open source program Ethereal, the reader opens packet trace files from the CD and follows the text to perform the exercises, gaining a thorough understanding of the material in the best way possible—by seeing it in action. This approach also benefits the instructor, who is spared the time-consuming tasks of maintaining a laboratory and taking traces. It can even relieve the anxiety system administrators have about students collecting traces on campus networks!